Wednesday, January 21, 2015

"Expelled" and "Religulous"

I had a bit of free time, so I watched the "documentaries" Expelled and Religulous.
They're both terrible, but one is terribler than the other.

I'm not sure there's much I can say about Expelled that hasn't already been said: the phony posturing of pimply Ben Stein pretending to be on a quest for truth, the truly awful soundtrack, the use of stock photos of Nazis and Communists, the absurdity of suggesting that evolutionary biology is like both Fascist Germany and Communist Russia, the elevation of Richard von Sternberg as a creationist faux martyr, and so forth. Still, there were some classic moments:

Schlubby Michael Egnor complaining about the "viciousness" of criticism he received. Really? Is that the same Michael Egnor who called a teenage girl who wanted to defend the separation of church and state a "pubescent brownshirt" ? Still, the NCSE got in the best line already, observing
drily that "Michael Egnor had apparently never been on the Internet before."

The reptilian David Berlinski calling Richard Dawkins a "reptile". Isn't that a bit like a skunk complaining about how badly someone else stinks?

Pamela Winnick complaining that her lousy work was "scrutinized". Oh, the horror! What's next, crucifixion?

Creepy Maciej Giertych (who, ironically, has been accused of publishing an anti-semitic brochure) getting all mystified about the source of "information" in DNA, when the answer is staring him in the face (it's mutation and recombination, duh)

Then it was on to Religulous. It wasn't that much better, frankly. Anti-vaccine loon Bill Maher is occasionally funny, but not as funny as he thinks he is. And then he goes and cites, in support of the Founding Fathers being anti-religious, a famous quote of John Adams:

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."

What Maher didn't provide was the context. Here it is:

"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion at all!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell."

Completely changes the meaning of the quote, doesn't it? This kind of intellectual dishonesty makes Maher as bad as the producers of Expelled.

11 comments:

"Creepy Maciej Giertych (who, ironically, has been accused of publishing an anti-semitic brochure) getting all mystified about the source of "information" in DNA, when the answer is staring him in the face (it's mutation and recombination, duh)."

Before you can have mutation you need to have a functioning organism, the simplest form being of the single celled variety. This organism requires DNA to function. Where did the information in the first single celled organism's DNA come from? That is the question. You cannot answer this by postulating a process that can only occur once this information is present.

This argument is founded on there being no self-replicating sub-unit of a cell. Only a certain RNA strand has been found to 'self-replicate'; this occurred when it was fed a copy of itself in a lab. This experiment did not simulate realistic conditions. Even this fabricated scenario has not been demonstrated for DNA or proteins. To progress to a cell from self-replicating cellular sub-units would require these major parts to be able to do this. Even for RNA, it would need to be a general behaviour so that mutated variations would still have this property to continue the lineage. Given how widely these molecules have been studied and their failure to demonstrate this feature, you must acknowledge that the information (blueprint of an organism) had to be present in the DNA of the first single celled organism before a process of replication with heredity and variation could have occurred.

"Before you can have mutation you need to have a functioning organism, the simplest form being of the single celled variety. This organism requires DNA to function."

True, an organism based on DNA requires DNA to function.

But what about an organism not based on DNA? Do you know for a fact that such a thing is impossible? No you don't.

"Where did the information in the first single celled organism's DNA come from."

Genetics probably predates actual cellular life. The very first genetic polymers have been theorized to be randomly assembled strings of selfish RNA viruses generated by a primordial hydrothermal metabolism.

1)"If you think the first replicator had to be a single cell like a modern single cell, you obviously haven't thought very hard about the problem."

So a basic RNA forms. This RNA has the property that it can build another RNA. All following RNAs maintain this constructional ability. This process continues, protein metabolism arises alongside it, eventually an RNA is randomly arrived at that can code for one of the proteins and replicate itself...a lot more action ... a cell.

In which case the information would have been generated through massive numbers of trials eventually generating the DNA blueprint of an organism.

Are you thinking something like this?

If you are, then this is what my third paragraph of my first comment is an attempt to refute. If you're not, then I have no idea what you think and would appreciate if you wrote a quick explanation.

2)" neither of these issues are directly related to the question of where the "information" in DNA comes from"

I don't work on origin of life, so why my opinion merits any attention is beyond me.

However, I do know that creationists babbling about "information" are not presenting any insuperable difficulties. For example, in a very simple digital simulation performed by Koza, self-replicators emerged spontaneously from a "digital soup"; see his paper in Artificial Life III, pp. 225–262.

So it does not seem at all implausible to me that this could happen in the physical world. We simply don't know that much about the origin of life, and babbling about "information" adds nothing to our understanding at present.

"I mentioned this specific thing in my original comment (the first in the thread)."

Sorry Unknown but you did not. There is no mention of noncatalyzed replication in your first post, you speak about self-replication there, but that's not what I'm talking about.

You can have replication of RNA without a self-replicator. There is no need to rely on self-replication to explain the origin of replication. A simple template directed replication under conditions of thermal convection cycles will do the job. You don't even need large complicated ligase proteins to catalyze the formation of phosphodiester bonds between the bases.

Unknown, you and Rumraket were not discussing the same thing. You were wrong when you claimed you had already made Rumraket's point, and your false claim shows that either you're lying about the thing you yourself just said, or that you're too ignorant to be aware of the differences between these different scientific phenomena.

"Unknown" just made the kind of mistake constantly made by abortion ambulance chaser Barry Arrington.